Message for the youth

USA: Central Christian Church has converted the second floor of the worship centre at its Glendale campus into a student ministry. Running its own services tailored to deliver the church’s message to teenagers, the student ministry incorporates different elements to its adult counterpart downstairs, including electronic music.

‘The sermons are more focused on issues that affect the younger members of the congregation and we mix our music a lot louder – I let the engineers really go to town and the kids love it,’ explains the church’s lead audio engineer, Milk Arnold. ‘In terms of the room, we’re playing wide. The room is about 12m wide by 6m deep.’

To ensure coverage throughout the room and to make it loud, the church installed Martin Audio CDD-Live speakers, mounting a pair of CDD-Live 15s in an L-R configuration and another two as out-fills to cover the width of the room. A pair of CDD-Live 8s are on the wall between the 15s, serving as in-fills.

CDD-Live was chosen due to its point source technology. ‘A point source box was a much better solution since there are trim height issues in the room which is short front to back,’ notes Mr Arnold. ‘I needed something that would cover properly from the height I had. That, plus CDD-Live’s differential dispersion, concentric horn technology gives us the nice, predictable rectangular coverage we need for the room.’

Glendale is one of five campuses that Central Christian Church operates in the state of Arizona. ‘I also love that the CDD-Live is a self-powered and Dante-enabled box because we’re in the process of changing over all the campuses to Dante networking so any room can talk to any other room,’ Mr Arnold furthers. ‘The Dante system allows repeatability and stability, and can be easily expanded. Also, eliminating the need for power and speaker processing is a major benefit because I can send anything to these speakers and the system is tuned and time-aligned without any external processing which saves a lot of time and makes everything a lot easier.’

This installation wasn’t the church’s first exposure to Martin Audio, as the Mesa campus is equipped with an MLA Compact system. ‘As the church’s demands for the worship spaces increase, I’ve had to continually improve the quality of the audio and Martin Audio has proven to be an excellent choice,’ concludes Mr Arnold. ‘Almost all our secondary spaces are going to Martin Audio-based systems.’